Knicks 95 Magic 97: Playing for the Draft!

The Knicks are not a good basketball team.

The Knicks are a bad basketball team. For those of you who are still Knick fans, if the season ended today, the Knicks would draft third! The kind of basketball this team is playing, it could possibly land them an even higher pick.

In case you missed it, the Knicks dropped their 6th(!) game in a row. It was certainly a battle of the bads tonight, and Orlando came out on top. It always seems like an opposing player has a career night against the Knicks. Tonight’s lucky winner was Evan Fournier. For those of you who don’t know him, he was the guy who was traded for Aaron Afflalo. Fournier had a career high 28 points tonight on 8-14 shooting, including 10-14 from the free throw line. Fournier took as many free throws as the ENTIRE KNICKS TEAM.

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We knew Nikola Vucevic was going to be a handful headed into the game, so I am not surprised he went for 20 and 13. Samuel Dalembert actually had an excellent game defensively tonight, and did well on Vucevic when they were matched up. Tobias Harris was a non-factor outside of a 10 point outburst at the end of the second quarter. Believe it or not, his little scoring barrage killed the Knicks as they headed into the half down 6.

The Knicks actually played well enough to win. Too many defensive lapses hurt them though as they really couldn’t get a stop down the stretch. They won the third quarter for the first time ever! Unfortunately, we decided to bench a hot Amar’e Stoudemire for almost the entire fourth quarter, and rode Jason Smith until he had given up a million baskets. Yeah, who wouldn’t want to have this in the game?

It was a tough game to lose. They actually looked like a decent basketball team for a while before reverting back to the Knicks of old. All that being said, we have some highlights, and definitely some low-lights.

Some Highlights…

• Carmelo Anthony looked good offensively finally. He lead the charge in scoring at 27 points on 10-17 shooting. He really got it going in the second half when the team needed him so that was great to see. May have sat on the bench too long in the fourth. He was +7 on the night.
• J.R. Smith picked up the scoring slack. Sure someone will point to his 6-16 shooting, but he wasn’t taking bad shots. All his shots were right around the rim (outside of his last second brick), and he gave the Knicks scoring when Melo was on the bench. He finished with 19 points, 4 rebounds, and 3 assists.
• Samuel Dalembert was awesome. He isn’t going to contribute offensively; we know that. But defensively he had 5 blocks and seemed to constantly be altering shots around the hoop. I wish he could actually jump and get more than 7 rebounds, but I’ll take those 4 assists! Very underrated passing big man.

Some Low-lights…

• I’ll make this one brief. Low-light of the game goes to Derek Fisher. Of course there are going to be people who say, “Hey, he’s a rookie, cut him some slack!” And yes, through 8 games I had cut him some slack. But when you are still “figuring out” you rotation after 9 games, what have you been doing the first 8? Is it going to take another 10 games to figure it out when you insert Jose Calderon and Andrea Bargnani back into the equation?
  • Am I the only one who was scratching their head when Travis Wear checked in the game in the first quarter? Not only did he check in, but he hoisted up back-to-back misses in his 5 minutes of -5 basketball. Tim Hardaway Jr. can’t get time in the first half, but Wear can?
  • Where was Hardaway? He has played well the last few games as a starter, and then we reward him by having him ride pine the entire first half. It’s no surprise he was cold after sitting their for half the game. For what it’s worth, he was still a team high +8 tonight.
  • Instead of playing Stoudemire in the fourth, we opted for Jason Smith, who had CLEARLY lost confidence in his jump shot tonight. It’s hard to imagine a worse post defender than STAT, but Smith has that one in the bag. I think any fan would rather see Stoudemire in crunch time than Smith.
• One final note on Fisher: nice play at the end. I always love watching J.R. launch contested 30 footers at the buzzer.

The dark days have not left The Garden. The Knicks are now 2-7 and a sinking ship. Phil Jackson basically came out and said if the Knicks don’t figure out their triangle offense by Thanksgiving, they’ll never learn it, and he’ll just go out and find guys who will. Could be an interesting storyline to watch (even if this season wasn’t all about the triangle offense already).

Fisher could take the route of Mike Woodson and just blame it on Beno Udrih. Yeah, it was definitely Beno’s fault tonight.

At least we have Utah next.